Why did you decide to write this essay? What was your intention for the essay when you started, and how did that evolve over time (if it did)? Was anything surprising to you? How long did it take you to write this? We’re interested in two answers: (1) over what time period you were ‘working’ on the essay—from idea to final draft—and (2) how long it literally took you to write the essay (the time you spent typing/revising/editing). What was the process you used to writ...

Every time I launch Thunderbird to read my RSS feeds, I’m reminded that not one, but two people I follow have the same names as friends who are no longer with us. I noticed this on Mastodon too, before I took my current social media hiatus. It’s… oddly nice to see them still going? Even though I know it’s not “them”. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-09-04. Every time I launch Thunderbird to read my RSS feeds, I’m reminded that not one, but two people I follow have the sam...

Weapons, weapons, weapons. War needs weapons. If you shoot a lot of missiles, you need to build more. If you drop a lot of bombs, you need to build more. Weapons kill the enemy. Kill the enemy and you seize terrain and accomplish your objective. A straightforward concept, easy to understand for any citizen, business leader, politician, or warfighter. But where do the weapons go? What targets do we employ them against? How are those targets found? How hard are they to find? What is the machine ...

Mathematicians are witnessing a profound shift in their field. AI systems are now producing proofs, spotting connections between distant fields, and, in a few cases, solving problems that had stumped mathematicians for decades. The pace of progress over the past several months has raised challenging questions: What can AI systems actually do? And what happens to the more human… Source Mathematicians are witnessing a profound shift in their field. AI systems are now producing proofs, spottin...

I had a splendid time in Stratford upon Avon for the premier of Duncan Macmillan and Dominic Cooke’s epic new stage production of Game of Thrones: The Mad King. And furthermore I’m thrilled to announce that the production will be moving on to London to share the experience with a wider audience. New venue and premiere dates will be announced in due course, and if you would like to hear about new information feel free to sign-up at: www.gameofthronesonstage.com It promises to be an e...

The difference between a medicine and a poison is dosage. Often we talk about certain habits, in programming or life, are good or bad. But few things are simple binaries. Some vary with context: reading a book is a good thing sitting in my garden, but not while driving my car. But another variable is dosage: a little pain-killer salves my headache, but too much will kill me. The importance of dosage was noticed by a 16th century Swiss physician called Paracelsus. His quote was or...

Exploring the performance of byte-pair encoding by optimizing a GPT-2 tokenizer. Exploring the performance of byte-pair encoding by optimizing a GPT-2 tokenizer.

Cultivation of the Vines, Henri Martin Kudzu is a plant that was once introduced from East Asia to the eastern United States as a way to combat soil erosion. But, kudzu, once introduced, grows aggressively and can overtake sidewalks, houses, foundations, and even trees. The only way to kill kudzu is to prune it aggressively, as a concentrated strategy enacted together by all the people who live near where the kudzu grows. You know where I’m going with this. An app feature, once...

In June I purchased this TrueTime XL-AK time server , so I could learn more of the history of GPS-based time. I received it on June 22, and just 16 days later a similar GPS time server took down Australia's cell service for 12 hours ! I made a short video about it but put off digging into the TrueTime... until now. Over the past couple weeks, I've 'restomodded' this device with a Raspberry Pi, to build a stratum 1 NTP Time server, which I'd like to eventually add to the NTP Pool . ...

Introduction A number of conversations have circled around a kernel to facilitate experiments with live programming in the context of Patchwork; a kernel with somewhat the flavor of Squeak , Forth or Lisp . If sufficiently simple and malleable , it should enable exploration within Patchwork , multi-user experiments, programming on tablets, and even debugging using our own tools (which can be customized) instead of the Chrome debugger. This note is about the kernel itself, apart from the...

In Python, the dict data structure is the conventional key-value structure. E.g., you might store a list of names as keys and have their phone numbers as values. Valentin Ignatev wrote this amusing post on X: It is indeed widely believed that, in the strict sense, the dict data structure and its companion, the set data structure, are O(1), meaning that as you increase the size of the data structure, the time to insert or query a key remains constant. Let us examine the claim. A hash ...

Richard Stearns (right) and Juris Hartmanis in May 1963. The main theorem from their seminal paper is on the blackboard. Stearns sent Lance this picture to help  celebrate the 50th anniversary of their paper . Richard Stearns died on August 29, 2026 .  Readers of this blog probably know him from the Hartmanis-Stearns paper On the computational complexity of algorithms which appeared in Transactions of the American Mathematical Society in 1965, and his paper with F. C. Hennie that gav...

six strings sit still song soon. six strings sit still song soon. six strings sit still song soon.

Anthropic publish the system prompts for their Claude consumer applications ( Claude.ai and the Claude mobile apps - sadly not for Claude Cowork or Claude Code). I love that they do this, and that they share not just the current prompts but historic changes to their prompts as well. They used to keep all of the prompts on a single page, but when I checked today I noticed they had re-arranged those prompts into an index page and then a page per model - here's the page for Haiku 4.5 fo...

Static Allocation, Constant Work Sep 2, 2026 In reply to this email: Memory Safety’s Hardest Problem named something I’d hit but couldn’t articulate. Your case is a pointer into one union variant surviving a write of a different variant, so live typed pointers end up reading bytes that belong to something else now. Last year I wrote a limit-order matching engine and shipped a use-after-free: a cancelled order was released back to the pool while it was still linked into its ...

About a year ago, I was offered a presentation slot at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin. I rarely take speaking engagements, especially international ones, but this one arrived at just the right time, the right place, and with the right person – I said yes, on the contingency that Ben Dumke-von der Ehe joins me in the presentation. Ben is an early community hire at Stack Overflow who lives in Berlin. We both had something important we wanted to talk about, with slightly diffe...

Shopify ended 2025 with roughly 7,600 employees, about 500 fewer than a year earlier, while revenue rose 30% to $11.556 billion. The company runs a remote-first workforce with no office requirement. This post covers Shopify employee statistics for 2026: headcount from SEC filings, regional and functional splits, median pay, hiring velocity and output per head. Every figure carries its source and period. Shopify Employee Statistics 7,600 Employees worldwide as of December 31, 2025, per Sh...

Via Wikipedia . This is my third and final essay looking at the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, and how it’s likely to affect housing supply. As I’ve noted in my previous two essays, this is a sprawling piece of legislation, with 59 sections spread across 12 different “titles.” So far we’ve looked at Titles I, II, and III, which together contain 24 individual sections. In this post, I’ll look at the remaining nine titles of the package. There are a lot of sections (35!), but m...

Why do so many calendar apps offer Sunday as the first day of the week? It's not the first day of the week, it's the last. Why is that even an option FFS? Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Why do so many calendar apps offer Sunday as the first day of the week? It's not th...

0.0 Context setting It’s Wednesday 2 September in Portland, Oregon, where it was the first day back at school which also meant it was time to start raining again. We made it on time! That was a big achievement, back pats and handshakes all around everyone. I started writing this episode a good four days ago on 29 August, and jeez has it been weighing on my mind in a very you should have finished this and sent it already sense. For anyone with the belief that writing this newsletter is e...

A lot of people think that good leadership requires radical responsibility . Conscious Leadership defines it like this: Taking full responsibility for one’s circumstances (physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually) is the foundation of true personal and relational transformation. Conscious leadership and teams take full responsibility – radical responsibility – instead of placing blame. This means locating the cause and control of our lives in ourselves, not in external even...

it is your primary job as a founder to find people who care about the problem you’re solving, tell them about your solution, and convert them to get sales. one reliable method that has been working well is to steal engagement from people talking about the exact problem I’m solving already. i.e. using social media to find people who’ve engaged with posts on my topic and reaching out to them. Here’s how that worked: almost a 2.5x better response rate! Tbh, this almost feels ...

I started off this year writing a lot, and wanted to keep up the pace. I did good at first! And then… I didn’t manage to. In some ways, this is because I have just been super busy! I’ve never had less free time, and I’m okay with that. There’s a tremendous amount of good things going on in my life. But it’s also put this whole Claude Code series in an awkward spot, because things have been changing so rapidly, that it’s been hard to keep up. And I also need to figure out what i...